JAWS Unleashed

JAWS on March 04, 2008

On paper, Jaws Unleashed is the coolest game you've ever played. Made by the creators of the slightly pointless, yet ecologically captivating undersea adventure Ecco the Dolphin, it lets you freely stalk the waters around a seaside town as a bloody great shark. It's incredibly gory, with Jaws able to snag hapless swimmers and tear them apart. You can smash piers, sink boats and eat everything from little tropical fish to a disgustingly huge whale carcass.

It would be awesome, if it wasn't hampered by horrible camera problems and gameplay that switches between repetitive chomping and absurd mission objectives.

In one of the early missions, for example, you're happily munching swimmers and sinking police boats, when all of a sudden the camera pans up to an oil refinery perched high above the water. You're then told to blow it up (you know - because you're a shark, so you can totally do that).

It turns out the key is a pair of goobers who throw exploding barrels at you from a bridge. You need to grab a barrel in Jaws' teeth and spit it at a pipe coming down from the refinery, which then sets the whole works ablaze.

The game never even hints that Jaws is capable of doing this. But once you figure it out, getting through the rest of the missions is a snap: just look for the green blips on your radar, and if they're explosive or otherwise dangerous - like rusty torpedoes, say - you can probably spit them at whatever you're supposed to destroy.